Revenge of the Weird* Kids

Revenge of the nerds?

Revenge of the nerds?

 

Why is J. D. Vance misrepresenting his ethnic background?

1) Because he’s a man with limited knowledge of his own family?

or is it because:

2) If he admitted his ancestors were once “not quite white” Appalachians, he would have to confront the real historical reasons for transgenerational poverty there?

or maybe:

3) By claiming to be “Scots-Irish”, he gets to claim a White Christian Nationalist identity which goes down well with a certain bloc of voters?

4) Or is Vance and his entire bootstrapping “Hillbilly” persona a construction crafted by shadowy multi-billionaire Libertarian puppet-masters who have been

grooming him for power?

The answer is probably “all of the above”.

*****

Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, has had a profound influence on Vance’s fast track political career, seeding him millions of dollars to launch “Narya”, before funding a successful campaign to win his US Senate seat in 2022.  No one in American history has occupied the office of vice president with less political experience.

Vance is also being cheered-on by Elon Musk of X and Tesla, and Jacob Helberg of “Palantir”.  “Palantir” is a Big Data mining and analytics company founded by the above-mentioned Thiel which services Big Business and governments – a powerful tool for politicians hoping to micro-target voters, identify points of dissent, and keep tabs on “enemies”.

These people are Libertarian in outlook, which essentially means they support complete deregulation of Big Tech and other mega businesses.

It is fascinating and simultaneously terrifying just how many of these Silicon Valley techno-feudalists have framed their outlook within fantasy worlds like Tolkien‘s “Lord of the Rings”, or on role-playing games like “Dungeons and Dragons”.

Over the past 50 years, any teenager prone to pondering “Big Ideas” eventually landed on Libertarianism as their pet political ideology for a while.  Most teenagers with even an iota of humility or social empathy eventually outgrow Ayn Rand and dumb Libertarian ideas, realising that it is nothing more than a fluffed-up, right wing version of anarchism – minus any social conscience.

Men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are essentially teenage boys who became rich enough to live out their adolescent fantasies well beyond puberty:

“My own sovereign territory on Mars!”

“Being cryogenically preserved in the name of immortality!”

“Controlling the fates of nations!”

“I bet Susan back in high school wishes she had gone to the prom with me instead of Josh!”

By funding and grooming a man like Vance – an underclass kid desperate to outrun his class origins – these creepily weird teenage-brained boy-men are within a whisker of being inside The Oval Office.

Think of Putin and his inner circle of oligarchs and you begin to see where the US under Trump, Vance, and the Tech-Bros would be heading.

As Vance himself stated while sucking-up to Trump earlier this year, a new administration would like to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people”.

He would be happy to deny election results if they don’t turn out well for the GOP this November.  He is also on record as saying he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election – at least not until various swing states had been allowed to submit “alternative” slates of presidential electors.

He’s also willing to fall into line with Trump’s plan to cut taxes for the already hyper-rich.

He has advised Trump to defy the Supreme Court if it rules him as acting unlawfully in firing executive branch officials.

He’s ready to take away from women the right to a safe and legal abortion – even in cases of rape and incest.  He has even toyed with the idea of blocking interstate movement of women suspected of seeking abortions in places where such care is still legal.  Just begin to imagine the levels of surveillance and invasive scrutiny required to enforce such a regime…

As for international politics, try this from a 2022 interview with populist rabble-rouser Steve Bannon:

“I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another”.

Even if we set aside the lack of humanity in allowing a democratic nation to fall to an autocrat, Vance shows a profound ignorance of the danger of allowing Putin to gain control of a country which acts as a bread basket to much of the world.  Or maybe Vance’s “handlers” are happy to divide the world into zones controlled by autocratic regimes (as aspiring autocrats themselves)?

*****

Social media is by nature a place for short-form articles, so we’ll just leave these names for your later investigation:

Ajay Royan, Marc Andreessen, Steve Case, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Vivek Ramaswamy, Colin Greenspon, Scott Dorsey, Ben Horowitz.

All of these big money players (along with Donald Trump, Jr., Tucker Carlson, and of course the aforementioned Peter Thiel) have had a role of some kind or another in the rise of James Donald Vance [Bowman].

The only massive tech businesses which Vance has expressed a negative opinion of are those he accuses of “censoring” conservative voices.

“We are in a late republican period…If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

That’s right, fake hillbilly.  Even a lot of conservatives are still uncomfortable with the idea of the USA as a dictatorship.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be dropped like a hot potato by Trump.  He’s starting to think maybe you’re not smart enough for the game he’s playing.

Oh well.  Maybe you could get back to your real roots, J. D.

Before your soul shrivels-up and blows away.

 

*bad weird, not good weird

Hillbilly Face

Image: Members of the mixed-ethnic Scott Family String Band (left and bottom); Minnie Pearl (top right)

Image: Members of the mixed-ethnic Scott Family String Band (left and bottom); Minnie Pearl (top right)

 

It is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.  To explain why, we need to step back in time…

America’s earliest cultural foundations always involved a delicate tightrope walk between the forces of God (Puritans, Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Mammon (speculators, Virginia Colony).

This delineation was of course not entirely clear-cut.  Puritans enjoyed making money, and most speculators were Christians.  It’s more a question of emphasis.

As eastern North America began to fill-up with colonists during the 1600s and 1700s, these parallel forces of “God and Mammon” began to rub up against one another, becoming more and more deeply entwined.

Most Christians in the USA today are unaware that the Puritans believed deeply in the theological concept of “predestination”.  That is to say, they believed that God had already decided at the time of His Creation how every single person’s life would unfold.

Puritans walked through the world wondering whether they had been chosen for salvation or damnation, constantly looking for signs of their place in the universal schema.

This is a difficult concept for us today.  Professing faith in God and Jesus while “doing good” in the world were of themselves no guarantee of a heavenly reward.

Why “do good” at all, then?

Because to do evil was seen as a “sign” that a person was being used as a vehicle for The Devil.  Anyone assisting in Satan’s work had obviously been “pre-selected” for damnation.

“Doing good” was a way of being extra careful to show all the outward “signs” of “pre-selection” for salvation.

It might sound strange now, but it was a bit like trying to “call God’s bluff”.  By modeling “Godliness” in their daily life, a person hoped they were acting-out their “pre-destination”.

This is part of what drove much of the Puritan work ethic, an ethic which would greatly inform later American attitudes to money, work, and leisure.  To be successful or wealthy was a sign of Divine Providence – in other words, God was giving a sign to His favored or “saved” people through His beneficence.

Such a view of the world is of course endlessly capable of an internal self-justification for just about anything.  The line between God’s plan and Satan’s work was patrolled by men, and through men’s interpretations of other men’s translations of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts.  And after all is said and done, every American Christian of a certain age remembers the wry observation that “The Devil can quote Scripture to suit himself”.

Every event which falls favorably for a person can be characterised as a sign of “God’s Providence”.

Even land theft.  Slavery.  Or massacres.

It is this mindset which can even re-construe plain wickedness as the “Hand of God” in action.

*****

This is not to draw a simple line between Puritan ideas of Providence and Predestination straight through to historical bigotry, racism, or current “prosperity Gospel”.  How ideas move, percolate and permeate a society is extremely complex.

As already mentioned, the forces of “God and Mammon” began to become more and more deeply entwined as colonial America became less fragmented.  Puritanism gave way to Congregationalism, while groups like the Baptists and Methodists became especially popular in rural places via revivalist meetings and circuit-riding preachers, especially in Appalachia and The Deep South.

It would take twenty articles to even begin to outline the ways in which various sects and denominations interacted and cross-pollinated one another.

But whether it was the Puritans, Anglicans, or any other religious group (with a few notable exceptions), class and race tended to matter a great deal.

And across most religions, the four most abused groups of people in North American history have always been:

1) The enslaved or formerly enslaved

2) Indigenous peoples

3) “White Trash”, aka Rednecks, Hillbillies, Melungeons, et al (note that New England also had such groups, called by other terms)

4) Women

All of these groups displayed characteristics which certain types of Christians could conveniently point to as a sign of God’s disfavor.

People are enslaved because God has placed “The Mark of Cain” upon them.

People’s land is taken from them because they are non-believers, and it is God’s “Manifest Destiny” being revealed.

People are poor because “The Devil makes work for idle hands” or because God has pre-destined it to be so.

Women are bound to submission, forever deemed to be “lesser” due to their “sin” in the Garden of Eden.

And if God himself has shown disfavor for certain people, then why shouldn’t humans do the same?

*****

Most think that the history of Blackface is only a story of “white people” blacking-up, and mocking African Americans.

The story is far more complicated.

For a start, USA culture has also been permeated with the constant presence of “Redface”, a sort of internal Orientalism, in which Indigenous Americans are othered and categorised according to “white” projections of “savagery” – alternatively violent or “noble” in nature.  This is a cultural phenomenon which would take volumes to attempt an elucidation.

This piece is concerned with an aspect of Blackface minstrelsy which many fail to notice – the regularity with which “The Dumb Hillbilly” is also present as a stock character, side-by-side with “The Plantation Negro”.  What sets “Redface” apart from “Blackface” and “Hillbilly Face” is that it is mainly the latter two who are consistently presented as objects of mockery for their imagined ignorance, stupidity, and other traits associated with the lowest underclasses.

Hillbillies or “white trash” have traditionally been so far down the American pecking order that even the children of poor Italian immigrants – people like Michael James Gubitosi, better-known as the actor Robert Blake – could make their start in show business in the 1930s as part of a dance troupe called “The Three Little Hillbillies”.

People of the American heartland who grew up in the 60s and 70s watching variety shows like “Hee Haw”, probably never stopped to think that this show was a late, almost post-modern, wink-to-the-camera, sanitized version of Blackface/Hillbilly face.

Regular guest Minnie Pearl‘s character, while seemingly self-mocking instead of ill-intentioned, was still pulled straight from the age of minstrelsy.

But set aside for the moment all the “white”, non-Appalachian people participating in Blackface/Hillbilly face.

It seems extraordinary to this writer that no one has seemed to notice just how many Blackface minstrel shows were comprised of and performed by people from “non-white” backgrounds, including Black Americans and people from mixed-ethnic backgrounds such as the Appalachian Melungeons.

Much in the way Black Americans began to reclaim words of insult over the past decades, and much in the way LGBT+ people have recently reclaimed the word “queer”, it seems that Black, Hillbilly, and mixed peoples began to reclaim minstrelsy in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Again, it is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” has co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.

The marginalised underclasses of the world have been doing this since time immemorial – using their streetwise or insider ethnic status to transcend and leverage the lower caste social identity placed on them.

They then bend it back onto the middle and upper classes, by selling a “product” to gormless outsiders who are willing to pay for an “ethnic experience”.

People like Jason Aldean and J. D. Vance are STILL performing Hillbilly Face, but not in the gently knowing, letting-you-in-on-the-joke way of “Hee Haw”.  And what makes it triple-twist funny, is that they and others like them don’t even seem to realize it.

 

#JDVance #hillbilly #blackface

Class War in the Age Before Codified Racism

Captain John Smith taketh the King of Pamaunkee prisoner [1608]

Captain John Smith taketh the King of Pamaunkee prisoner [1608]

American History 101 (or 289?)

“Mr. Potts, a Master of Arts, well practised in Chirurgerie and Physique, and expert also in distillinge of waters.”

In 1623, Dr. John Potts, holder of a masters degree from Oxford University in England, prepared a poison to be served in wine to the Powhatan delegation to peace talks in Virginia Colony.

Apologists for the wrongs of English colonisers will say that this act of duplicity was in retaliation for Powhatan attacks on English colonists – without mentioning that Powhatan attacks were themselves in response to the violent raiding and theft of Powhatan winter food stores by English colonists at Jamestown.

Although wealthy himself, Dr. John Potts was later convicted of cattle theft from his own fellow colonists.

Some female colonists at Jamestown who were captured alive in raids by the Powhatan were later ransomed back by Dr. Potts.

So a decent enough rogue our Dr. Potts.  Right?

Not so fast.  Dr. Potts only ransomed-back the wives of his own indentured servants who had perished in Powhatan raids, so that these traumatised women could work-off their dead husbands’ “debts”.

One hostage later petitioned for her release from “slavery” stating that her subjugation and indenture by Dr. Potts:

“…differeth not from her slavery with the Indians.”

 

#jamestown #colonialism #indigenousamerica

Fake “Race” versus Real Ethnicity

Olmec head made in Mexico sometime between 1000 and 1500 BCE

Olmec head made in Mexico sometime between 1000 and 1500 BCE

 

Continuum…

Our local once-a-year jazz project wrapped-up last night.

When considering what the USA has given the world, you’ll usually hear things like Hollywood, rock & roll, cheeseburgers, or democracy.

I’m not here to defend the merits or legitimacy of those claims.

But jazz.

As jazz legend Art Blakey once remarked “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life”.

In centuries to come, when the USA is but another in a long line of defunct empires, I hope the world will still be playing some form of jazz.

At the end of last night, a very friendly and elderly lady was passing among the tables in the lobby, handing-out a survey form.  By its questions, this survey was clearly intended to gather the data required to show the value of this music festival to the local community and economy when applying for government funding.

The section of the survey asking questions of ethnicity was a somewhat heavy-handed attempt to collect data showing how music encourages the positive aspects of “multi-culturalism”.

Those being surveyed were asked to circle their “ethnicity”.  This is the only question I refused to answer on the questionnaire, because as I’ve written a hundred times here and elsewhere, “white” is not an ethnicity.

The idea that I would be lumped into a group including people from Poland, Spain, Michigan, New Zealand, Canada, Florida, South Africa, or Finland for “diversity” figures was rankling in the extreme.

And I imagine that those of darker complexion would find it annoying if various peoples from Madagascar, California, Nigeria, the UK, Brazil, Senegal, South Carolina, Jamaica, or Kenya were collectively described as being from the same ethnic group.

This placing of “race” above culture and actual ethnicity is why I got home and put-up yesterday’s post, inviting people to pretend for a moment that “race” actually exists in the American sense.

Many readers described the man in one of the pictures correctly – by POPULATION GROUP, rather than “race”.

Most readers were honest, and said that in the USA, the people in both photos would probably be simply described as “Black”.

The boy on the left is from the Batek tribe of Malaysia.  The man on the right is a central Pacific Marshall Islander (where Bikini Atoll saw the USA conducting atomic tests during the last century).

If our identity were determined by genetics alone, both of these people are more closely related to many Europeans and indigenous Americans than to most Africans (Africa being the most genetically diverse region on Earth).

But of course our identities are far more complex than a collection of inherited genes.

The colossal Olmec heads of eastern Mexico show facial characteristics which most Americans would associate with Africa, yet they were sculpted thousands of years before West Africans began their forced migration to the Americas.  In other words, the genes which can be expressed as certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) are present IN EVERY POPULATION IN THE WORLD, including the European population.

It is easy to forget that much of Europe was probably still “black” as recently as 8,000 years ago.

If either of the people shown in yesterday’s post were to immigrate to the USA, their unique histories and identities would soon be subsumed within ridiculously arbitrary “race” categories.

I am not here to explain anything to American people of color, who know only too well that the “Black experience” is very real, even if actual “race” is not.

But spreading a wider understanding of how population genetics actually works is one small part of dismantling race-based social and political structures.

 

#raceisasocialconstruct #weareallrelated #ethnicity

Blackness and “Race”

Faces which prove that "race" is a social construct

Faces which prove that “race” is a social construct

 

In the USA, skin color and phenotype (physical appearance) have been used for over 400 years as indicators of “race”.

Even worse than this, “race” is then used as a proxy for “ethnicity”.

But “White” is not an ethnicity.  And “Black” is not an ethnicity.

These “colors” are social caste categories which have become normalised as ethnic identities.

It would be intriguing to see how followers of this blog would describe the people in these photos to someone, if that person asked you to say what “race” these people are.

Explanation to follow in tomorrow’s blog…

 

#raceisasocialconstruct #raceisapoliticalconstruct #raceiscaste

The Decline of Hillbilly Socialism

Class War in West Virginia

Images:  Workers Alliance meeting, Scott’s Run, WV [1937]; Woman digging refuse coal from snow to heat her home, Scott’s Run, WV [1937]; Gun emplacement at Battle of Blair Mountain, Logan County, WV [1921]

Politics in the USA has been run under a two-party system over the past century.

It is easy to forget that without combined state and corporate-funded violence and corporate media propaganda, the USA might still have a Socialist or Social Democratic Party.

And no, we’re not talking about Communism or Soviet-style collectivism.  We’re talking about a party which would have developed along the lines of modern European social democratic parties – such as those in Scandinavian countries which enjoy taxpayer-funded universal healthcare, third level education free at point of delivery, paid vacations, maternity/paternity and sick leave, etc.

In 1912, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs of Indiana garnered 6 percent of the popular vote – that’s nearly a million Americans.

In fact, the increasing popularity of socialist policies at the time probably forced other candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt to throw a few token bones to socialist ideas (such as the standard eight hour workday).

The mass unemployment caused by the 1929 stock market crash gave new impetus to groups affiliated with the Socialist Party – groups such as the Workers Alliances.

Mining companies abandoned many of the “company towns” they had built, leaving the inhabitants literally stranded – often penniless, cold, and hungry.

It is worth remembering that the great Wall Street crash came just 8 years after the largest armed uprising in American history outside the Civil War – the Battle of Blair Mountain, in which attempts to unionise the coalfields of SW West Virginia led to a five-day pitched battle between over 10,000 coal miners and around 3000 company-backed strikebreakers and law enforcement officers which left between 50 and 100 miners dead.

The uprising was eventually suppressed by the intervention of 27,000 members of the army/National Guard.

Most mountain folks weren’t out-and-out socialists in the commonly understood political sense.

They were just very clear-eyed about who was community, and who was the enemy.

They most certainly were NOT friends of unimpeded capitalism, coal barons, and Big Business.

It would take decades of concerted and constant anti-socialist indoctrination to mostly erase this proud history of cross-ethnic solidarity and mountain activism from the general consciousness, eventually allowing modern venture capitalists like J. D. Vance to make his ridiculous proclamations of having an affinity with “hillbilly culture”.

 

#jdvance #hillbilly #socialism #unionism

Handmaid

Vance with wife Usha at Republican convention, July 2024

Vance with wife Usha at Republican convention, July 2024

 

This website and podcast has been busy this week preparing a new podcast episode while writing about J. D. Vance and his misrepresentation of his ethnic background.

I thought enough had been said.  But wait.  What is this all about?

In 2013, while both were attending the elite Yale Law School, J. D. Vance and his future wife Usha Chilukuri jointly organized a discussion group focusing on “social decline in white America”.

Really?  A child of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, India with a degree in early modern history develops a particular interest in “white social decline”?  What does “white decline” even mean?

A year later, Usha Vance began work as a clerk under then DC circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh, a later Trump appointee to the Supreme Court.

Four years later she clerked for conservative Supreme Court justice John Roberts.

And here’s where it quickly goes from fishy to super rancid-smelling…

Three years ago, Usha Vance contributed to the election campaign of Blake Masters, who was running for a US senate seat for the state of Arizona.

In a small blessing for US democracy, he lost.  Why a blessing?  Because 37-year-old Mr. Masters is an open and awowed fan of the white supremacist “philosopher” Sam Francis, who died nearly 20 years ago.  You may have heard versions of Francis’ “thinking” tied-up with white-fright ideas like “The Great Replacement Theory”.

Masters has also worked for and received millions of dollars in backing from Peter Thiel, the creepy multi-billionaire puppet-master behind the financial and political rise of J. D. Vance, the ultimate fake “man of the people”.

Now.  Either Usha Vance has had her mind poisoned by a conniving coterie of wealthy white supremacist “Libertarians”, or she is so eager to join the ranks of western financial and political elites that she is blind to the hideous hypocrisy of her decisions, much like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman in the UK.

Either way, there are some seriously ugly forces at work in America right now.

 

PS. Before We Were White will continue to highlight political issues directly rooted in concepts of “racial supremacy”, which is America’s unresolved original sin.

 

#jdvance #ushavance #heritagefoundation

Sometimes I Forget Myself

 

 

Vance pedigree

Vance pedigree

 

The image shown is the family tree of J. D. Vance, Trump’s pick as GOP running mate in this November’s election.

I’ll explain the funny little flag symbols at the end of this shortish piece…

Aside from being Trump’s new poodle, J. D. Vance is the author of the notorious New York Times bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” published by Harper about 8 years ago, which was made into a film, and has re-entered the bestseller lists this week.

This book is a political manifesto thinly disguised as a memoir, and was lapped-up like milk and nectar by the urban chattering classes, who believed they had found their “man on the inside”, someone able to explain why an entire segment of American “white folks” seemed so singularly unable to lever their “white privilege” in economic terms.  Even worse, while suffering the same economic conditions historically endured only by Black and indigenous Americans, these “white folks” seemed to insist on voting for conservative political candidates.

How could this be?

In his book, Vance claimed to be a “hillbilly” descended from “Scots-Irish” people, before proceeding to punch-down hard from his position as a venture capitalist supported by pseudo-Libertarian billionaires like Peter Thiel.  Vance essentially blamed 20th century Appalachian poverty on an inherited and unadapting “Scots-Irish” culture, and more recently, on a resigned and work-shy, “let’s live on food stamps” mindset.

Vance’s knowledge of the economic and ethnic history of Appalachia is not just limited – it is flat-out wrong.

In fact, his knowledge of HIS OWN ANCESTRY is even less informed – but that doesn’t stop him from developing an entire sociological thesis based on what looks like a quick Google search of his surname origins.

Southern Appalachia has been one of the most ethnically mixed places in the USA since the 1770s, and almost no one with deep roots there can legitimately claim that “Scots-Irish” forms the greater part of their genetic inheritance.  This is a fact which can be backed-up with hard data, whatever the faceless editors of Wikipedia pages, and propagandists for a “white” history of Appalachia might claim.

 

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People with a far better grasp of history than J. D. Vance seem to have absorbed the ideas of writers like David Hackett Fischer (author of Albion’s Seed) and used these ideas as a springboard for the construction of an imaginary “Scots-Irish” identity.  Fischer is a serious historian, but his vision of who first settled the American frontier has some serious blind spots.

Here’s how it works:

Pick a remote ancestor from your family tree with the ethnic identity you prefer.  Vance has ancestors who have been in America for centuries, so he has 16 second great grandparents who were born in America during the 1800s.  Let’s ignore the fact that NOT ONE of these 16 second great-grandparents can be proven to descend from Ulster folk – aka the “Scots-Irish”.

Ignore the fact that even if Vance had one second great-grandparent with a great-grandparent from Northern Ireland, this one single remote ancestor would still represent only a miniscule percentage of his overall genetic inheritance.

Of course “genetic inheritance” is only a tiny part of who we are.  Our cultural environment has far, far more to do with our identity.

In Vance’s case, he would like to believe he is “Scots-Irish” both by blood and culture – perhaps because in the imagination of many insecure “white” American males, such a background speaks to their idealised, “white” Christian nationalist aspirations and preferred virtues.

Fighting for honour?  Scots-Irish.  Stubborn and independent?  Scots-Irish.  Clannish?  Mistrustful of government?  Loyal to a fault?  Why, those are “Scots-Irish” things, of course.

I’ll stop right there, and let you read quotes which Vance included and seemed to endorse in his book “Hillbilly Elegy”:

“In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else. This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits – an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country – but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

This sort of palpable nonsense is problematic and dangerous on multiple levels.

Number 1, Appalachia is NOT primarily Scots-Irish, and Vance certainly isn’t primarily “Scots-Irish” by genetic or even cultural inheritance.  Not even close.

How do I know this?  By spending twenty years tracing the ethnic roots of heartland America.  Vance is a distant cousin on multiple lines, and I happen to be aware of who “his people” really were, because they are “my people”.

Number 2, the persistence of certain cultural traits in 21st century Appalachia has nothing to do with any continuity of a “Scots-Irish” subculture from the 1700s.

Every single trait Vance sees as “Scots-Irish” might equally apply to Appalachians of Welsh, German, English, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, Jewish, Romani, or indeed, Cherokee, Shawnee, or African ancestry.  One might quite rightly speak of “Appalachian” or “Mountain” culture, but this culture is the product of DIVERSITY and centuries of inter-ethnic mixing.

There is actually IS one aspect of “Scots-Irish culture” seen in America which might be described as especially “Ulster Protestant”, but self-identified “Scots-Irish” people rarely mention it.

This would be a familiarity with the actual mechanics of colonialism, and how to use violence to maintain economic supremacy over a disenfranchised indigenous population…the “Scots-Irish” did it first in Ulster, and many did it later on the Appalachian frontier.  Read up on “The Paxton Boys” for an introduction to this subject.

Number 3, this elevation of traits supposedly unique to the “Scots-Irish” is just another, more subtle face of an older American belief in race and race eugenics.

Instead of attributing certain local traits and behaviors to the complex cultural environment created during the violence of the frontier era, people like Vance just call it innate “Scots-Irishness”.

This is all a bit reminiscent of those old newspaper horoscopes which were always intentionally vague – so people could always find a way to relate the words to their own circumstances…

Instead of looking at Appalachia’s past and current problems through the lens of racism, reliance on hunting and subsistence farming, bad economic policies, poor infrastructure, corporate pillage of resources, and revivalist religion creating a legacy of poor education going back to frontier times, let’s just call it “Scots-Irish hillbilly culture”.

In other words, Vance and other charlatans like him – even when using the word “culture” instead of “race”- actually want to believe that certain things are exclusive to certain groups.  That certain things are “in their blood”.

This sort of fake history, this cherry-picking of ancestors, this claiming of “true American values” as being mainly synonymous with only certain groups, this, this, bullshit quite frankly- it goes to the very heart of the current social and ideological divisions seen in the USA.  The center can no longer hold.

Half of America wants to grow-up and confront the past with open eyes in order to move forward in a fact-based reality.

The other half wants to drag everyone into a world based on a conjured reality – a world of propaganda and historical whitewashing, a world of jingoism, blind nationalism, and Christian faith.

This is why politicians are banning books.  This is why American history teachers are being put under pressure with new restrictive legislation, why Florida’s current governor now endorses new history books claiming that African-American slaves actually benefitted from enslavement in certain ways.

White Christian Nationalists want to “own” American history, and by extension, they can then “own” American identity itself.

And when the facts don’t match their fake identity, they will simply lie, or attack the person laughing at The Emperor’s New Clothes.

After all, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”, as George Orwell warned in his famous novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four“.

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I’ve given so much time to Vance’s claims of so-called “Scots-Irish” ancestry because many, many people who claim this identity in Appalachia are fully as multi-ethnic as anyone else there.

And this includes people like J. D. Vance, who is happy to embrace a scant, possibly non-existent ethnic component of his “white” ancestry to suit an ideological political narrative, while ignoring his closer ties to the mixed-ethnic “Carmel Indians” of Ohio and other brown people of Eastern Kentucky like the Melungeons.

This does a great, a serious disservice, to the complexity and fascinating real history of the region – and an even worse disservice to truth.

It is White Christian Nationalist propaganda worthy of anything spoken by German National Socialists about “pure Aryan” people back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Never, ever, become a book-burner. But after you’ve read “Hillbilly Elegy“, make sure to place it firmly in the “fiction” section of your book collection.

Now.  About the symbols in the Vance pedigree.

The modern national flags are only meant to give a general indication of the predominant ancestry on each line. But even the people behind, say, an English flag will be mixed to some degree.

You will note the complete absence of any flag indicating Ulster or “Scots-Irish” ancestry.

The little circular “Before We Were White” logo indicates lines with “Melungeon” or what I call “Old Mix American” people – meaning people of non-Northern or Central European background:

Indigenous American, sub-Saharan African, Malagasi, South Asian Indian, North African, Spanish, Portuguese, Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jewish, Romani, and others.

The fact that J. D. Vance is not “Scots-Irish”, and has innumerable “non-white” ancestors is not important in and of itself.

What matters profoundly is the attempt by Vance and the GOP to rewrite history in an effort to make it match a White Christian Nationalist ideology.

Whether Vance or Trump believe this stuff is beside the point.

They will use it to mobilise a section of the American people large enough to bring down democracy.

 

#jdvance #fakehillbilly

Whither the USA?

Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in the 1982 film Bladerunner

Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in the 1982 film Bladerunner

 

Writing the day after a young man attempted to shoot Donald Trump in the head, one question comes to mind.

Whither the USA?

Do decent Americans appreciate the gravity of the current political situation?

The rabble have a “blood martyr” now.

The sheer power of Christian nationalist ideology to make people blind to any other reality is impossible to overstate.

I escaped my own hyper-evangelical family over 40 years ago, yet even today sometimes find myself reading the news through a lens borrowed from The Book of Revelation – a text written by an unknown man on a Mediterranean island sixty some odd years after the death of Jesus.  If a secular-minded student of history can find it hard to escape his childhood indoctrination with the pseudo-mystic prophecies and ravings of a Jewish convert to Christ worship from 2,000 years ago – with its visions of serpents, and beasts, and seven-headed dragons – then what can we expect from people who buy this stuff wholesale?

I had my own vision a few years back of creating a website and podcast for people interested in a truthful telling of American history.

To borrow a quote from one of my favorite films, I fear that anything written or spoken by good and honest people today will end up lost, “like tears in rain“.

Not looking to be an overtly political writer.  But what part of existence is not “political”?  Just looking for some hope here.

What are all the good people doing in preparation for what this November is likely to bring?

Feeling Blue on Boggy Creek

Drive-in movie

Drive-in movie

 

They say there are only six basic building blocks or themes behind every story ever told.

Some storytellers know this, others don’t.  The ones who realise this usually try harder to bring something new or surprising to the table.

When it’s done cleverly, like in the Coen Brothers retelling of a 2,500 year-old story by Homer in “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, it can be great.

Unfortunately, Hollywood seems to be giving-up on any artistry in its recycling of the same ancient stories, hoping that CGI and franchise familiarity will be enough to keep the money train on the rails.

Virtually every single film in the Marvel Universe is a bad version of the early medieval classic “Beowulf“, which itself betrays elements of even more ancient traditions.  Even “European” folk tales like Cinderella have roots far, far deeper than many imagine, having often arrived in Europe via the various Silk Roads from the east.

I was feeling nearly as old as Beowulf this week when I realised that it is five years since the abysmal THIRD iteration of “Charlie’s Angels“, over twenty years since the second, and just short of half a century since the original TV series with Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith – a show which made a fortune for Wella Balsam shampoo, red swimsuit manufacturers, and hairdressers skilled in the “feather cut”.

It’s also 25 years since “The Blair Witch Project” was widely thought to be reinventing the horror film genre with its faux documentary approach.

But of course this style of film-making had already been done way back in 1972, with the drive-in movie cult classic “The Legend of Boggy Creek“, which centered around the search for a Bigfoot-type creature near a small town called Fouke in the swamplands of southwest Arkansas…

*****

Director Charles B. Pierce channelled Truman Capote‘s documentary writing style from “In Cold Blood” (about real monsters among us) into a B movie about barely-glimpsed, maybe? real monsters hiding around us.

The wider cultural impact of this film on conservative America is hard to overstate, mainly because there has always been a tension at the heart of America’s relation with wilderness – poised between fear, wonder, and exploitation.

The story trope of hairy wild men is ancient and universal, but particularly potent in a nation so new to its colonisers that it was possible for newcomers to believe that almost anything might be lurking beyond the next ridge, hidden in the undergrowth of a dark ravine, or skulking at the back of a hidden cave.

North of the swamps around Fouke and Boggy Creek lie the Ozark Mountains of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas, which are in a way the westernmost extension of southern Appalachia.

Most people forget that when the slaveholder and frontiersman Daniel Boone pushed through the Cumberland Gap in 1775 – making way for a torrent of settlers and precipitating disaster for indigenous peoples – he himself never settled-down until reaching Missouri.

Thousands of Kentuckians and Tennesseans would do likewise, with many eventually settling in the Ozark Mountains.

We should not picture Missouri or Arkansas as trackless wildernesses at that time, however often Americans claim to have “tamed” the west.

These lands were certainly wild by today’s standards, but they had already been long settled by indigenous tribes, the French, and then for a while, Spanish peoples. There are still a few people alive today around Old Mines, MO. who speak the so-called “Paw-Paw French” dialect brought there during the 1600s from French Canada.

And these were not just a few hunters and trappers and traders. There were actual towns like Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, Saint Philippe, and Prairie du Rocher (all on the east side of the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois), with Ste. Genevieve on the west side of the Mississippi River in present-day Missouri.

Indeed, the very word “Ozarks” probably derives from the French “aux Arcs“, which is short for “aux Arcansas“, meaning “at the place of the Arkansas” – the Arkansas being the French name given to the indigenous Quapaw people.

Part of the reason many Appalachians chose to settle the Ozark Mountains is exactly because the best arable bottom land along along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was already taken – long before the first English speakers arrived.

But there is another reason so many Appalachians sought out the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains…

Anyone who has followed this blog and podcast for a while will know by now that the most remote parts of Southern Appalachia were settled by multi-ethnic peoples trying to outrun the color caste system in states back east.  Because mountain land is hard to farm and difficult to access, it had two things going for it as regards mixed-ethnic underclass communities.  One, it was cheap (and in many cases free) to those wlling to squat it.  Two, with the law scarce on the ground, mountains offered a sort of refuge for people hoping to just be left alone with their own people.

So just as happened in Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky during the late 1700s, Arkansas and Southern Missouri became destinations for displaced indigenous and mixed-ethnic peoples during the early 1800s.

Branches of Melungeon families like the Collinses migrated to the Ozarks during this time.

In fact, so many mixed communities ended-up in this region that they gave their names to landmarks like Portuguese Point, overlooking the Gasconade River.

Regular listeners to our podcast will already know how “Portuguese” had become a complex signifier for various “not quite white” people in early colonial America.

Those willing to do some serious digging will discover that many Ozark people descend from Smiths, Scotts, Harmons, Shumates, Oxendines, Benenhaleys and other families with Jewish, Romani, Lenape, Catawba, African, and even Arab ancestors.

Put it all together – remote mountain places, bears and wild cats, people with unfamiliar customs and of unusual appearance, people with a desire to avoid mainstream society – and it’s little wonder that embellished tales of hairy wild men have existed in the Ozarks region for generations.

Long before “The Legend of Boggy Creek“, there was the “Blue Man” of Spring Creek, in Douglas County, Mo., for example.  Here is an excerpt from The Springfield Republican in 1915:

“…Douglas County farmers were searching for the ‘Blue Man of Spring Creek’ who was seen after an absence of four years. The Blue Man was…first seen in 1865 and described as ‘unmistakeably human, though resembling a vicious animal…with long black hair’ covering his ‘blueish black skin’. The first recent sighting was six weeks prior, when Oc Collins, who was said to have taken part in a raid of the ‘Blue Man’s’ den four years earlier, lost two lambs and came upon their pelts in a hollow two miles from his house. Since then, others had seen him, noting that his hair was no longer black, but gray, and that he was not as robust as when first seen in 1865…”

Now we might be inclined to laugh, and to wonder if these Ozark mountain folks had been overindulging in their own product while minding their stills in the woods.

But here’s the thing.  There were mixed-ethnic families in Southern Appalachia since the late 1700s who carried a recessive gene which was expressed whenever a male and female carrier of the gene had children.

This recessive gene caused a blood condition known as methemoglobinemia.  The main visible symptom of this blood disorder?  Blue skin.

The idea of a blue-skinned descendant of Appalachian settlers of the Ozarks of southern Missouri surviving as a livestock-robbing, shunned backwoods hermit is profoundly depressing, infinitely sad, and terrifying at the same time.

Mainly because it is a far more plausible explanation for the surviving “Blue Man” folklore.

The folk stories we invent in order to varnish a dark reality are always the scariest.  Look up the historical theories behind fairy tales like The Pied Piper, and shudder…

*****

This has been a long post, so we’ll circle back around to pop culture’s habit of repeating itself with fluff like Charlie’s Angels.

Or to be more precise, let’s forget the actual show, and look at someone involved in the show.

Jaclyn Smith, who played “Kelly Garrett” in the original Charlie’s Angels TV show, actually got her first break as an actress in Charles B. Pierce‘s follow-up to “The Legend of Boggy Creek” – a film called “Bootleggers“, set in the Ozark Mountains.

Jaclyn Smith‘s father was the son of recent Russian Jewish immigrants.

And Wikipedia, as usual when actual research is lacking, notes Jaclyn Smith‘s mother as having Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and English ancestry – without citing a source.

Jaclyn Smith actually does (unusually for most Americans), have some “posh” English ancestry going back to the slaveholding Farrars of colonial Virginia. And some apparently Scottish “Urquhart” ancestors.

But for some reason, as is so common again and again and again in American history, her maternal links to descendants of pirates and privateers, and to what appear (on the basis od DNA) to be colonial era German or German-Jewish “Hartsfield” or “Hartzfeld” slaveholders, receives nary a mention.

They say there are only six basic building blocks or themes behind every story ever told.

But the biggest thing behind most stories, is the story we are trying to hide.

#history #legends #movies